


Death and Spaceships

by Gryphonrhi



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, I Don't Even Know, Tumblr: Writing-prompt-s, Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 10:26:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14932490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gryphonrhi/pseuds/Gryphonrhi
Summary: For this writing prompt:In order to live another day, you need to take a human’s life. Like a flower needs water and sun every day to survive, you need to spill blood onto the ground. One day you find yourself lost whilst hiking.  You see a crashed spaceship. 2 hours left. Will the death of an alien keep you alive?





	Death and Spaceships

Going on a hike with someone who promptly ‘disappears’ is an excellent way to trigger a police investigation you don’t want and, to be honest, probably can’t afford. A body a day to clean up… it’s inevitable that you’ve made a mistake somewhere. But being in a national park, hiking for ‘fun’ and all those random people? Most of whom have _not_ left a note on the dash saying when they left, on what trail, and when they should be back? (It might get their car broken into, after all.) That’s a target rich environment.

Usually. Not today. Today, you haven’t found anyone out by themselves and if you haven’t killed by sunset? Well, your father went that way and it wasn’t pretty.

Neither was defending yourself from him in that last half hour before the curse jumped to you.

Real sunset, nautical sunset, is in two hours, but you’re in the mountains. It will be dark well before that and your life is literally a curse; gods only know how precise the sunset deadline will be. You’ve never wanted to test it, so it’s a relief to see a plume of smoke that really shouldn’t be in the middle of protected lands.

Well, well. Someone needs help, perhaps? They will if the park ranger sees them. Of course, if you find them first, they’ll only need burying.

Unfortunately, fifteen minutes of scrabbling across the scree shows you that whatever is burning doesn’t look like any plane, helicopter, or glider you’ve ever seen. And smoke doesn’t usually burn cobalt blue with darker purple sparks kicking out. 

That partially-crumpled, silver, copper, and obsidian mass looks like a spaceship, honestly. One that’s burning anywhere it’s not charred, melted, or still crackling. Even if anyone survived that crash, you probably wouldn’t make it in and back out again. Papa always said the curse required a human life – you never asked if he tried sentient animals, but you’re sure that he tried some kind of large animal at least once -- and who knows whether aliens would satisfy the curse anyway?

Also, that smoke is going to bring too much company too quickly.

So. Time to try your fallback plan, and you’d better make it fast; you've already lost too much time on this wasted hope. Honestly, it’s just been that kind of day, but… really. If you’re going to try to be alive come morning, there’s no point in promptly setting yourself up to end up dead shortly thereafter from lack of forethought.

Off to hide, then.

You work your way back up through the ankle-deep, shifting rocks until you can finally veer off to a mound of fallen trees you spotted on the way down. A few minutes of work clears the debris off the ground into an artfully-careless screen. You even take a few seconds to lie down and double-check that there’s no good line of sight to you in the middle of the downed pines, but no one should be able to get a good look under even the outermost tree of the lot.

You ought to come out of the shirt anyway, so you fold it up to make a pad between your back and the tree trunk. The hand sanitizer from your backpack is colder than the air as the sky grows darker. Your muscles have started to twitch – might be the curse, might be anxiety, but yeah. You’re probably running out of time.

Your bowie knife is always sharp, always put away clean, but you apply more sanitizer to it, for the same reason you took off your shirt: if this does work, no point in setting yourself up for infection. Then you lean back against your tree, tug a branch a little closer and mound up some dirt in front of your chest, then set your knife carefully between ribs. It’s not easy; this is _not_ your usual angle for a kill shot.

Right hand over left to drive it in, because this is going to hurt like hell and fast is better than slow. Brace against the tree so you’re on your side and you’ll bleed onto the ground during the last few frantic heartbeats. You can’t help but smile about the paradoxes in this... and then you push the knife into your heart.

Aliens, death, or a self-powered curse – no matter which comes next for you, it’s going to be something new after almost a hundred years like that.

Might almost be worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> At least I finally wrote something? And I have a multi-day car trip coming up, so hey, time to go back to work on WIPs.


End file.
